In some applications, it may be useful to connect similarly labeled elements into regions based on contiguity. An individual region may then be studied, processed, analyzed or otherwise treated as a connected unit in order to determine region properties, to identify the object class to which the region belongs or to apply a specific process to the region's elements. An exemplary process may comprise the application of a region-specific filter to all the elements in a region.
The process of connecting elements into regions may be referred to as connected-component labeling, and such algorithms may be cited in the image-processing literature as connected-component algorithms. Methods and systems for computing connected regions efficiently may be desirable.